I by and large agree with what you said about personal responsibility. As far as so many countries shifting to the left, I would say that the fairly recent elections in Germany and France have shown a move to the center with regard to the 2 leaders of those countries. Gordon Brown's popularity in G. Britain is at a low point. I've even heard the Russians warn us against moving too far left. If anybody knows about socialism gone wrong it's them. You can lump Great Britain into that also. They figured it out in the 70's that it was no panacea. What scares me and should scare us all is government getting control of the economy. That's why you should fear single payer Health Care.
I fear our government and most of its goals. This is the first time I have felt this way, too. I'm old enough to have had "duck and cover" drills in grade school, starting in first grade. I remember the Principal rolling a TV into our classroom when Kennedy was shot, although I don't remember the Bay of Pigs happening, although my dad and I went to the south side of MKE to see Kennedy when he was here just before going back to Dallas, where he was killed. I remember how shocked the country was by this, and how we used to have a national identity, with goals
as a nation. I remember watching the astronauts landing on the Moon (we got our first color TV that evening), I remember the riots, seeing a lot of coverage about the Cold War, Viet Nam, the DNC in Chicago and I remember how little it took to shock people to their core. I remember people who didn't have much but they were proud to have what they did because they worked for it. Now, everyone wants a freebie. They want to win the lottery and if they had the guts to think about how much they pizzed away on Lotto tickets, they could probably have paid for college.
People don't really care about anyone but themselves. They talk about doing things for others, they watched Live Aid (probably more to do with seeing their favorite rock stars and thinking it was cool to do what they told them than actually doing something for someone else), they donate money and food, they take little online quizzes so they can think they count but they don't do much for others that takes a lot of effort or is inconvenient. They hop on bandwagons because they think they agree but have no idea what they're agreeing with. They have no qualms with killing people in school because they were bullied, they think being in a gang, thug life, dealing/doing drugs are cool or they want to be the next big rapper/rock star/athlete/person of the week/reality show star. They think school has nothing for them and go on to lead a life of ignorance, dependence and poverty. That's all bullshyte. Giving things or money can help if the administration of it doesn't hoover up most of the money or take credit for it when all they did was push paper and pencils around on a desk. People think the world owes them, for some reason. They're offended when someone tells the truth. They somehow think it's OK to force the majority to change their ways to those of the "offended" minority in issues like religion, politics, health, etc. Nobody who is accused of a crime has any reason to worry about the full penalty unless everyone in town watched them do it, it's on video and they're recorded confessing after being Mirandized. Even then, their lawyer will probably tell the jury that the whole thing is all a misunderstanding and whatever they said has been taken out of context. Some members of the media think it's OK to draw a diagram in the sand, to show where our troops are, in relation to the enemy (Geraldo Rivera), tell military secrets "on condition of anonymity" or sell scientific, government or military info to other countries for some money.
In the words of Bart Simpson, "I didn't think it was possible but this both blows
and sucks".
